The prints were on the fourth stair, and Ysra found them because she was not looking for anything.
She had come down the Undercroft stair at the change of the watch with a lamp in one hand and a bowl of cold porridge in the other, because Pell had made too much at supper and had told her, with a look that brooked no argument, that the stair would not eat it all by itself. She did not like the Undercroft stair. She had never once said so aloud, because it was not the kind of thing a Watch said. But she counted it every time she went down, and every time she came up, and the count had been a little uneasy since the morning of the cord.
She stopped on the fourth step with the bowl in her hands. She was not sure why. There was no sound, no shift of weight under the stone, nothing that a count would have caught. But the lamp-light had fallen across the tread at a low angle, the way it does at the bottom of a stair, and the surface of the stone was still damp.
Ysra set the bowl on the step below and crouched.
There were footprints. They were small and clear and bare, and they had been pressed into the dish-worn centre of the tread, one after another, as though someone had come down the stair with their feet still wet from a river and had stood motionless on each step while they dried. The marks had gone pale at the edges. They had left a faint crust of salt around their rims, a white dusty line that caught the lamp like frost. The prints themselves were dark with damp in the middle, where the water had sunk into the stone and stayed.
She did not touch them. She sat back on her heels and looked along the stair, down to the Undercroft’s dim threshold, and then up to the top. There were more. She could see them now, one below the other, on the fourth stair and then the third and then the fifth, scattered and faint, each one a little paler than the last, as if they had been made on different days.
Ysra went up the stair fast, two steps at a time, and fetched the mason.
Harrow came down with his cord over his shoulder and his cap in his hand and his face set in its usual grave attention. He did not say anything when he saw the prints. He went down the steps very slowly, counting, with his hand on the wall for balance and the lamp held low, and at the bottom he stopped and crouched and looked for a while at the first print on the fourth stair.
“Six,” said Harrow.
“Six what?”
“Prints. Six, on the fourth step, and the same on the third, and I’ll bet the fifth. Six on each of the three.” He touched the rim of the salt-crust with one finger, lightly, the way he touched a stone to find out whether it was sound. “And they’re getting smaller.”
Ysra came down beside him. She looked at the prints, and then along the line of them, and she saw it at once. The first footprint on the fourth stair was long and narrow, the heel deep, the toes spread a little, as a child’s foot is when it has been running on a stone floor. The next was a little shorter. The one after that was shorter still, and the one after that had lost the spread of the toes and begun to look almost like a foot that had learned to walk carefully.
“It’s been coming down the stair,” said Ysra slowly, “for weeks.”
“Six weeks,” said Harrow. “Or near it. I’ve been reckoning it since the cord. The drying’s been going on in layers. You can see it in the salt.”
“Who is it?”
“A child,” said Harrow.
“Whose child?”
Harrow did not answer that. He stood up, slowly, with a grunt and a hand on the wall, and looked round the Undercroft’s threshold at the dim room beyond, where the Keystone stood on its squat plinth with its fish-scale rows catching the lamp. Then he turned back to the stair and went up it again, one step at a time, counting aloud, and Ysra followed him, because she could not do anything else.
At the top of the stair Ysra found the bowl of porridge still sitting on the step where she had set it, cold and grey and untouched. She had forgotten it. She picked it up. The stair was steep and the wall was cold and her hand was shaking a little, and she thought suddenly of the grey shape that had come up over the twenty-second step on the wall-walk, folded and patient and very careful, and she set the bowl down again on the top step with a small hard click.
“It’s a stranger,” said Ysra. “The Kitchen’s rule for a stranger’s bread. You put it where they’ll find it. You don’t say who it’s for. And you don’t watch.”
“Then you’ll not watch,” said Harrow.
“I’ll not watch,” said Ysra. “I’ll count it in the morning.”
She counted it in the morning. It was the first thing she did, before the bread, before the minutes, before the sun had cleared the marsh. She came down the north stair in the grey light with her hands in her sleeves and her face set, and she went straight to the top of the Undercroft stair, where the bowl sat on the step exactly where she had put it, and she looked down.
The bowl was empty.
It had been scraped clean. The porridge had gone, and the spoon had been taken too, or had never been there. The bowl had been lifted from the step and carried across the stone, and set down, very neatly, on the top of the wall beside the stair, in the exact centre of the flat coping stone. Ysra stared at it. It sat there, grey and empty and perfectly level, as a clerk sets a finished page on the corner of his desk to dry.
Beside the bowl, along the length of the coping, someone had laid out a row of crumbs. They were fine and brown and very carefully arranged, in a neat line of short upright strokes, with a longer stroke crossing each group. They were not scattered. They had been placed. Ysra counted them without meaning to, with the Watch’s reflex, and then counted them again, slowly, with her lips moving.
Nine.
She did not say anything for a while. She stood at the top of the stair with the wind coming up cold from the yard and the crumbs lying on the coping in their tally, and she thought of the stair she had counted every day since she woke, with its twenty-two treads and its one wrong step and its shallow lip at the fourth. She thought of the cord that came up one knot short, and the survey that said nine, and the tenth tread that she had felt under her boot three times and had never once been able to explain.
Harrow came up behind her, counting the courtyard flags under his breath. He looked at the coping, and at the bowl, and at the crumbs.
“Nine,” he said.
“It’s counting,” said Ysra. “The child’s counting the stair, and it’s got to nine. Nobody’s told it there’s a tenth.”
“Or nobody’s told it the stair’s got ten,” said Harrow. “Which is a different thing, and I’d not like to say which.”
Ysra turned round. Her face was pale and tight.
“I’ll not have a child counting my stair,” she said, with a sudden fierce sharpness that she heard in her own voice and could not soften. “It’s the Watch’s stair. The Watch counts it. It’s not a thing for children to learn their numbers on.”
Harrow looked at her for a moment. He did not argue. Instead he went to the top of the Undercroft stair and sat down on it, on the top tread, with his legs stretched out and his back against the wall. He took the lamp from Ysra’s hand, which she did not resist, and set it down beside him, and he folded his arms.
“I’ll sit here,” said Harrow, “and count the prints, and you can go and count your merlons. And we’ll see who’s counting what, when the child comes up.”
The child did not come up. Not that morning, and not that afternoon. Harrow stayed on the top step until the lamp had burned down and the light from the yard had gone thin and grey. Ysra came back twice and found him there, sitting with his arms folded and his eyes on the dim stair below, and both times he said that nothing had come up, and both times he went back to counting the prints. He had been counting them since the first morning. He did it aloud, under his breath, in his deep slow voice, as he walked down the stair in his head from the first print on the fourth step to the last.
It was late in the evening when he stopped.
Ysra was at the top of the stair. She heard him stop. He had been counting steadily, the way he always did, and then his voice had fallen silent in the middle of a number, and she turned round and saw him sitting motionless on the top tread with his hands on his knees and his face turned down toward the faint pale marks on the fourth stair below.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The sixth,” said Harrow.
He kept his face down. His voice was very low and very flat, and there was something in it that Ysra had never heard before, not in all the weeks since she had woken. It was not the dry professional pride of a mason who has set a stone square. It was something closer to fear.
“The sixth print’s the same size as the first,” said Harrow. “Long and narrow, with the toes spread. The heel’s deep. It’s the child’s foot, the way it was on the first day. It’s not grown at all.” He lifted one hand, very slowly, and laid it flat on the stone of the step beside him, as though to hold it still. “Six weeks, going up and down that stair. And not an inch of growth in it. Not a finger’s width. Every step the same size as the last, from the start to the end.”
Ysra said nothing. The cold of the stair had come up through her boots into her legs, and she could feel it in her chest, and she could not move.
“My stones can’t account for that,” said Harrow quietly. “I’ve counted everything in this Hold since I woke, Ysra. And that’s the one thing I can’t count.”
They sat in silence on the stair for hours after that, the mason and the Watch, with the lamp guttering between them. And when Ysra at last lowered the light, to see the stone, she found that someone had scratched a line into the top step beside Harrow’s hand. It had been done with a careful child’s fingers, or perhaps with the point of a nail, in capital letters that wobbled and leaned as they went, as a boy writes when he has only just learned how.
It said TOBIN. And beside the name, in a neat, precise, tiny column, someone had cut nine short tallies, one after another, each one with its own careful hand.